1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a removable medium having a unique ID and more particularly to a system and method which allows or prevents writing data to that removable medium based on the security level of the medium and the security level of the data.
A removable medium—such as removable disk, tape, optical or flash memory—has the intrinsic capability to be transported within and beyond a boundary. This has advantages because data can be transported from one stationary computer system to another. But it is also an increasing threat for enterprises because a removable medium also allows stealing of data and introduction of undesired data such as viruses.
Therefore a system and method is required allowing or preventing to write certain data to a removable medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Some operating systems have conventional applications possessing the capability to enable or disable the use of a removable medium from writing, reading and deleting data. However, these conventional applications use methods that either entirely disable or entirely enable the ability to write to a removable medium. Respectfully, these methods will either restrict the ability to write any data to a removable medium, making the medium ineffective for any writing, no matter how benign, or completely enable the ability to write any data to a removable medium, posing the threat that critical data such as patent disclosures can be written to the medium and transported secretly outside a company's facility.
There are also other conventional applications that run on computer systems that allow the writing of a subset of files to a removable medium. The subset is configured by an administrator of the computer system. However, the application writing the subset of files only runs on one computer system. Thus, if a company has hundreds of computer systems, the application must be configured and adjusted for each computer system individually which requires a lot of inconvenience and effort.
Therefore, a system and method is required allowing or disallowing the writing of files to a removable medium, based on the identification of the removable medium. The files which are allowed to be written to a particular removable medium can be configured at a central computer. This central computer controls the ability of hundreds of computer systems to write to the particular removable medium. In addition, the ability to write to the particular removable medium is configurable on a per-file basis.